


asterisms

by moonatoms



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 08:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11986368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonatoms/pseuds/moonatoms
Summary: It hadn’t rained since that day. Three weeks, four days, eleven hours ago. It hadn’t rained since that day and every morning, when the rough light of dawn came to chase away the endless sky of the night, she wished it would.





	asterisms

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
> 
> Many thanks to Antarctic_Echoes and BurningUpASunJustToSayHello for reading over this!

It hadn’t rained since that day. Three weeks, four days, eleven hours ago. It hadn’t rained since that day and every morning, when the rough light of dawn came to chase away the endless sky of the night, she wished it would.

Sometimes she closed her eyes and tried to pretend. Tried to create a world out of the ashes that remained, a world in which words had not been said and doors had not been slammed. A world in which he hadn’t left. A world full of soft kisses and the gentle breeze of the wind on her face on starlit nights. A world in which the gentle rumble of his words lulled her to sleep as he traced constellations on her back. A world where there was laughter and the warm taste of home. A world in which he stayed.

But no matter how much she tried, the pieces would never fully assemble. No matter how much she tried to change the angry words that had been spoken and morph them into something softer, as soon as she woke up to the coldness of the sheets beside her the ashen castles of her fantasy crumbled inside her.

He was gone and the hole he had left was deep and black and if she wasn’t careful she would drown inside it.

She moved through life like wind, airily and quiet, always present and never there. The days were long but she cherished every second that she could work or spend with her daughter or fill with any other tedious task that stopped her from thinking too much. It was after nightfall, when the world had gone to sleep, that her heart broke again. It was when the stars showed their light and when she was reminded of everything that she had lost.

Three weeks, four days, eleven hours and all she could hope for was the rain.

 

* * *

The stars no longer held any appeal to him. He had lit them, once upon a time, before he had rebelled and fallen. Breathed air into them and watched them come to life and captured their soft glow deep inside his heart.

There had been darkness afterwards. You couldn’t see the stars in hell. There was only ash and fear and an endless, starless night.

It hadn’t been the same after, when he’d come to earth. They’d lost their magic, nothing but mere dots of white on an otherwise somber sky. For years, he tried to get back the feeling he used to have when walking beneath them. The whispered assurance of everlasting light, even in the dark hours of day and night.

But then she’d come into his life. She carried her own light within herself and shared it gladly, giving life to something deep inside him, a sense of love and wonder he’d never known.

And he could recall in great accuracy all of the many hours they had spent sitting on his balcony, or driven out into the dark to watch the stars. He had told her all he knew about them and it almost felt like he was young and lighting them again, to shine for just her and him. And in her eyes he’d captured the stardust, deep blue and pure and bright. Full of the promise of always and forever.

But forever is nothing in a world where a human lifespan is but the first hour of dusk. After that comes the cold dark night. Every second that passed brought them one traitorous tick closer to the end.

It wasn’t fair that he wouldn’t get to hold her until the end of time. Breathe in her scent and see the stars sparkle in her eyes. Her absence would hurt more than falling ever had, and all he’d have left would be fading memories, taunting him like the stars in the night sky already did, reminding him of everything that he had lost.

He hadn’t been able to take it. Hadn’t been able to stay. How could he hold her, knowing that he would have to let her go? That her heartbeat, so strong now, could fall silent any second?

How could he kiss her when every kiss could be the last?

So he’d left.

There had been yelling and the slamming of doors. And then silence.

It was always silent now.

 

* * *

At least there were clouds in the sky today, she thought. With luck, they’d persist well into the night. It was cold and she pulled her jacket tighter around her and wrapped her arms around herself. She didn’t know what had brought her to the beach today. Trixie was with Dan and Maze was out on a hunt and the house had been quiet in a way that had seeped deep into her bones. Maybe it was the loneliness that echoed through every corner, or the coldness of beginning fall. She’d gotten into her car in the dark grey of the cloudy evening light and somehow she had ended up here, back where it had all begun.

Back where they had spent many nights, when the city grew too bright and hid away the stars. They’d driven through the night and somehow had always found their way here. She could point out all the constellations and asterisms one could see from here even in the light of the day. She knew their secrets and they had long known hers. But now they sucked away the light instead of giving life to it. And she could no longer stand their sight.

The beach was empty, save for the water and her. The tide rolled in slowly and then quietly moved away, a constant, soothing rhythm. She kneeled down and let the water wash over her fingers and then slip away again. Just like he had. She had wanted him, all of him.

And maybe she had wanted too much.

A flock of birds flew by overhead, she followed them with her eyes and wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to have wings to spread and the ability to fly. She’d never wondered it before _him_ , always too much of a realist, too grounded in life. But she’d asked him once, after he’d shown her, as they lay beneath the open night sky. And he’d told her all about it, the burden it had been but how freeing at the same time, and by the end of it she had felt like she was there with him. In the air with nothing but them and the stars, almost touching their light as the earth moved below. The memory tasted like bitterness on her tongue now. She swallowed it down and let her eyes drop back onto the beach.

In the distance but not too far she could make out a lone figure cloaked entirely in black. His back was turned towards her and he was staring off into the distance, but her breath hitched in her throat anyway. The dark suit and black hair, his tallness, she would have recognised it anywhere. If she tried hard enough she could probably remember his smell, too, and the taste of his skin. Closing her eyes against the onslaught of emotion, she turned around quickly as bile rose in her throat, her feet moving out of their own volition to carry her far away.

She didn’t know how far she’d walked when a hand on her arm stopped her and suddenly he was there. His suit was pristine and he was clean-shaven, but his hair was rumpled and there was a desperation inside the dark black of his eyes as they met her own. As if he couldn’t believe she was actually here when he had sent her away.

Neither spoke for a few seconds as they drank each other in. It was only then that she noticed that he was still holding onto her arm. A warm, comforting presence, so right when it should have been wrong.

She stepped back to put some distance between them even as her eyes never left his. She couldn’t speak, not with him standing so close to her, smelling of scotch and cigarettes and his favourite cologne and _home_. When his eyes were pleading with her, what for she didn’t know.

She needed to get away. She needed to stay. But what if he left again? Her heart was already broken, shattered into thousands of pieces. He had the power to pick them up again, but he could also destroy what little she had managed to re-assemble. She wouldn’t be able to take it again.

He saw the decision in her eyes before she had even made it.

“Wait”, he said quietly, but there was a desperation to his voice that she’d never heard before, something that spoke of longing and of loss. “Please…I’m…I’m sorry…”

“You’re sorry?” She hadn’t meant to sound quite so harsh and she _had_. Three weeks, five days and eight hours and he was sorry? He didn’t get to be sorry, not when he had just walked away. When he’d promised her the stars and then erased them from the night sky.

“I can’t do this”, she whispered, breathed the words into the heavy air between them. He flinched as if he had been slapped, but she couldn’t be sorry. Could only be sorry for the tears she had promised herself she wouldn’t cry.

“I’m just going to go”, she tried to keep her voice strong even if the words fragmented at their ends.

“I didn’t want to leave.”

She closed her eyes at this. Five words that she had longed to hear, five words that weren’t nearly enough, could neither erase what had happened nor paint over it.

“Then why did you?”, she asked when she opened them again after a beat. Couldn’t bear to look at him and yet couldn’t look away.

“Because I didn’t know how to stay.”

His voice broke off on an exhale. The words remained, and grew in the air around them until they were almost suffocating her.

“What do you mean by that?” She didn’t want to know and she _needed_ to. Even if there was the possibility that what he said next would cut like a knife through her carefully crafted façade and chase the air out of her lungs.

“I couldn’t deal with the thought of losing you”, he said, lashes fluttering against his cheek with every word before he opened his eyes fully again. In their dark depths she could see the tears that he would not cry.

She wasn’t as strong in the face of the current of emotion that swept her away. A bitter laugh escaped her lips even as tears pricked at her eyes. It was the sound of weeks of anger and anguish and desperation, drawn from somewhere deep inside her.

“And how’s that going for you?” she asked mirthlessly.

Their eyes met again, darkest night and mid-day sky. His long fingers curled into a fist by his side only to unfurl again a second later as he spoke.

“Terribly”, he whispered, shook his head, looked down at the ground between them and onto the invisible line that had drawn itself when he had left, separating what had once been whole.

“I just can’t do this, I don’t know how I am ever supposed to let you go.”

Her stomach churned, an angry rumble that rose high and higher and she had to clench her teeth in an effort to steady herself.

“But you did.” She let the anger bleed into every word, paint them red and raw like she felt inside. “You just left, left me, and you wouldn’t even explain why. How was I supposed to feel? Did you ever think about that?”

His eyelashes fluttered, but he didn’t let himself give into the temptation of shutting them, forced himself to look at her and into her eyes. Could see nothing but the anger and the heartbreak that he himself had caused.

He knew he’d made a mistake the second he had left. It was what he did, he broke everything that was whole. The world fell apart around him while he walked on. He promised her he wouldn’t hurt her and then he went and did, the only promise he’d ever broken and the one he would not be able to fix.

He’d told himself it would be easier. It hadn’t been. The love he felt for her was not a switch, it was not a fire that one can just put out. It was a star that would burn for billions of years, until the end of him or the end of time, whichever one would come first. He’d been worried about not having enough time with her. In the end he had nothing but the memory of a few, beautiful, starlit hours and days, and only himself to blame.

She had asked him to stay once. He hadn’t, instead he had left. He had no right to ask her to stay now.

And still he would. He had to. For three weeks, he hadn’t seen the stars, just dim lights on a dark night sky. Had wandered aimlessly through the world with no light to guide him home and nothing to brighten the long, cold day.

“I’m sorry”, he said again, his eyes closing in anguish as his voice wrote the words into the air. “I know it’s not enough, but I just…I just couldn’t imagine my life without you and I thought this would hurt less but it didn’t.”

He breathed in again, a long, anguished inhale that did not manage to fill his lungs.

“Instead I gave up the only good thing that has ever happened to me”, he whispered.

Her hand had stretched out of its own volition at the pain in his voice, but she retracted it before it could touch him. Still, she stepped closer until they breathed the same air, let her hands fall to her side as she spoke.

“We would have figured something out”, she said.

He looked up at her, at the stardust in her eyes that was glowing brightly in the dying day.

“How? I am banned from heaven and you will not end up in hell. All we’ll have are these few years on Earth.”

He paused, took another deep breath, exhaled softly. “It’s not enough.”

She shook her head, a sad smile finding its way onto her lips.

“It’s not”, she agreed. “But I’d rather have a few years with you, than no time at all.”

He nodded at that, face raw and open now and so young. As if he’d just fallen, from the sky and into the dark. But this was not the end and maybe he could rise again, maybe they could rise together and mend what had broken.

His hand found hers and she sighed as their fingers interlaced, falling into place like two pieces of a puzzle.

“The last few weeks have been worse than hell”, he confessed and squeezed her hand, let it vanish almost completely within his larger one.

She bowed her head in acquiesce. They stood silently, caught in limbo like the twilight around them that was captured right at that brief moment right in between night and day. Time would turn light into dark and dark into light, it would carry them on its wings and drown them in its deep seas. And maybe they’d be able to persist, maybe they’d be able to escape.

They had so far. Had found themselves again by chance, or through the guiding hands of fate. This was their second chance. They couldn’t turn the clocks of time, couldn’t go backwards and erase their mistakes but they could move forwards, let their wounds be healed and scars fade.

“This doesn’t fix everything”, she whispered into the beginning darkness of the night.

“I know”, he replied. “But I do know that I don’t want to spend any more days without you if I can.”

It was the truth. Even in the dark, she could see it clearly on his face. Her throat constricted and she could only nod in the face of the emotion she felt welling up inside her.

“How do I fix this?”

He spoke the words quietly into the black air. She stepped closer still, let her free hand come to rest on his arm, gently trailing it up until she reached his shoulder.

“We talk,” she responded. “You can’t do this again, Lucifer. You promised me forever and then you left, without explaining why.”

A sad smile found its way onto his lip, she could see the regret etched into every trembling line. It was his to carry, but she wanted to wipe it away anyway. Her hand traveled down to his shoulder blade and she pressed herself up and against them, canting into the warmth that she had missed every single long day since he had left. He didn’t hesitate, let go of her hand that was still holding his to let his fingers come up to tangle in her hair while the other pressed her closer still.

“I have already broke that promise”, he exhaled softly against her skin. “I can’t give you forever.”

“No”, she acknowledged and felt the same pang of fear and sadness that had driven him vibrate in her chest. “But you can try. We can try.”

He turned his face against her head and pressed his lips to, her hair, her eyelids and finally the soft skin of her cheek, kissed away the tears that had spilled over.

“We can only try”, she whispered again.

Above them, the sky had opened up, clear and bright and he let his hand come up to her jaw to raise it slightly and when she smiled, he could see stardust reflected in her eyes.

Together they stood in silence, looking at the familiar sight. Three weeks, five days and nine hours and for the first time they could see the stars again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [asterism (n.)](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/asterism): a group of stars that form a pattern in the night sky.
> 
> Thank you for reading everyone.


End file.
